


What Happened In Vienna

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 12:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8327422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: It was while Alec and Magnus were in Vienna that Alec first started thinking about Magnus's immortality.





	

It had been the trip to Vienna that had made Alec start thinking about the fact that Magnus was immortal and that he was not. He’d known it, of course, but in the early days of his relationship with Magnus it hadn’t been an issue, and he hadn’t thought anything of it. They had been to Schonbrunn Palace one day, and heard the story of how Mozart, as a young boy, had jumped up onto the lap of the empress Maria Theresa. Magnus had said nothing at the time and Alec had thought no more of it, until a few nights later when they had attended a concert and the venue also laid claim to being the place where this had happened.

“I wonder where he really did jump on her lap?” Alec had asked as they left. “Surely both can’t be right.”

“Neither, darling.” Magnus had laughed. “He jumped on to mine. He took one look at the Empress and ran away screaming. But in order to allow her to save face among the people who were there, this was the story that was circulated at the time.”

Alec had laughed along with Magnus at the time. But that was the first time he consciously thought about the fact of Magnus’s immortality.

 

A few days later they found themselves in conversation with a mundane couple in their hotel, and the conversation had somehow come around to how Alec and Magnus had met. Alec had said that his sister and their friends had persuaded him to go to a party Magnus was hosting and they had left it at that. However the same could not be said for the other couple, who went on for half an hour about how they had met on the 92 bus. Once the couple had gone, Magnus had joked about imagining the looks on their faces if they’d told them that he and Alec had actually got together properly after Magnus had saved Alec from injuries inflicted by the demon Abaddon.

“Or even if we’d talked about the party, and how my sister’s mundane boyfriend managed to get himself turned into a rat.” Alec had laughed. 

“What about our first date, with the mundane who tried to mug us, the woman who thought you should become a stunt actor, and not forgetting The Butt Song?” Magnus laughed along with him. “We should have tried to tell them just to see the looks on their faces.”

“Still, there are stranger stories. There’s a legend in my family that one set of my great great grandparents met when my great great grandfather burst into the London Institute yelling ‘My father is a worm!’”

Alec had never entirely believed that story before. Yet when he repeated it to Magnus, Magnus was nodding along and smiling. “I wasn’t there at the time, but I know the story well. I knew Gabriel and Cecily, though not so well as her brother Will and his wife Tessa.” At a later date, Alec was to realise that the Will Magnus had so casually referred to here was in fact the Will Herondale who Camille had believed to have been one of Magnus’s lovers. He knew by that time that there had been no truth in that, but it didn’t even matter. It bothered Alec once again to be reminded of Magnus’s immortality.

But it wasn’t until he’d called Jace from the hotel that he’d started thinking about it from the other perspective; that Magnus would be around long after he had gone. Jace had said something about could Alec imagine Magnus telling stories to their grandchildren about incidents such as Simon the rat. “That’s if any of us ever go on to have grandchildren, of course,” Jace had continued, “things with Clary are…”

Alec knew he was supposed to be listening to that as a good parabatai would, to be offering advice, but he found that he wasn’t even paying attention to Jace, because he had just realised that what Jace said was true. Magnus was going to go on long after Alec died, they were never going to get the chance to grow old together.

Maybe Isabelle would be a better person to talk to about it. She was dating Simon the vampire, after all, and if they made it work (Alec suppressed a shudder at the notion) there would come a time when she would face the same issue. But when he tried to talk to her about it, she’d just found out that Simon had also been seeing Maia at the same time as her, and she was ranting something about how Simon could forget any kind of eternal life because when she next saw him she was going to kill him, Alec knew he wasn’t going to get any helpful advice from her either. He was getting along better with Clary now than he did, but still didn’t feel that he could go to her about it. So he decided to put a lid on it, try and enjoy the holiday, and try and ignore anything that made him think along those lines, such as the time they were watching the monkeys in Vienna Zoo and Magnus started talking about his old pet monkey, Ragnor.

But it never quite worked. From the Mozart story, to the monkey, even the stupid in-flight movie that Alec decided not to watch once he realised the main character was an immortal man, he couldn’t let go of the whole idea of Magnus’s immortality, of the fact that Magnus would one day go on to have a future that didn’t include him.


End file.
